Spending that exhausts a budget is shown to decrease satisfaction with purchased products relative to spending when resources remain in the budget. Six studies, including those in which participants earn and spend real resources and evaluate real products, explore this bottom dollar effect. This research contributes to prior mental accounting research regarding how costs influence decision making (e.g., bundling, coupling, sunk costs) and to the satisfaction literature. Supporting the role of pain of payment in this process, we show that the bottom dollar effect increases as effort required to earn budgetary resources increases, decreases in the presence of windfall gains, and decreases when there is less time between budget exhaustion and replenishment. Mediation analyses further demonstrate the role of payment pain in the bottom dollar effect. Implications are discussed in the context of behavioral research, marketing promotions management, and public policy.

marketing applications for at-risk populations: the value of focusing on (1) vulnerabilities versus strengths, (2) radical versus marginal change, (3) targeting versus nontargeting, and (4) encouraging knowledgeable versus naive consumers. They conclude with a discussion of the significance of including at-risk consumers as full marketplace participants and identify future research directions.

After people incur costs to get future benefits, they usually track these costs in their mental accounts and are keen to receive the benefits when they become available. We introduce the notion that costs and benefits can occur either in the same accounting period (day, season, etc.) or in different periods. Our key argument is that monetary costs are tracked across accounting periods but that temporal costs are written off at the end of the period in which they are incurred. Thus, accounting periods lead to a time-money asymmetry in the tracking of costs and, consequently, in the likelihood of seeking benefits. In a laboratory study, an online-panel study, and a field study with movie-theater patrons, we demonstrate how this relationship among accounting periods, cost tracking, and benefit seeking is different for time than for money. Our findings offer insights into the sunk-cost effect, time-money differences, and mental accounting. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

In today's retail marketplace, consumers receive little or no consistent brand‐level sustainability information, but this may change in the near future. Developing hypotheses based on the comparative brand processing and information disclosure literatures, we conduct a retail laboratory choice‐based experiment to test predictions related to the effects of brand‐level sustainability information on choices, product evaluations, and retailer perceptions. Compared to the status quo condition in which no sustainability information is provided for the product category at the retail point of purchase, the addition of positive (negative) sustainability information for the brand yields higher (lower) product evaluations and increased (decreased) brand choice. In addition, due to greenwashing concerns, many consumers may be skeptical of product‐level sustainability information, and we address the moderating role of this skepticism on retailer‐related perceptions.

This study reveals the therapeutic origins of the “good mother” ideal in a rarely studied context, that of transracial adoptive mothering. Using a comparative discursive analysis supplemented by illustrative case analysis, we show that what it means to be a “good mother” in transracial adoptive mothering discourse differs significantly from the ideal established in mainstream mothering discourse. The key differences uncovered relate to publicly contested challenges to legitimacy, the experience of stigma for families adopting children of difference races, and a relative dearth of market‐based solutions to these challenges. We propose therapeutic ideology as a powerful macro‐level theoretical construct capable of explaining the self‐reinforcing cycle of mothers' anxiety, expert advice, and market‐mediated solutions.

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